Posted
by
BeauHDon Wednesday March 14, 2018 @09:00AM
from the straight-to-the-source dept.

A new study shows how global climate change can have ripple effects at the local level. According to the research, extreme winter weather is two to four times more likely in the eastern U.S. when the Arctic is unusually warm. The Verge reports: Researchers analyzed a variety of atmospheric data in the Arctic, as well as how severe winter weather was in 12 cities across the U.S. from 1950 to 2016. Since 1990, as the Arctic has been warming up and losing ice, extreme cold snaps and heavy snow in the winter have been two to four times more frequent in the eastern U.S. and the Midwest, while in the western U.S., their frequency has decreased, according to a study published today in Nature Communications. The study, however, only shows there might be a correlation -- not a direct causal link -- between the warming Arctic and severe winters in the U.S. And it doesn't show how exactly the two are connected, so it doesn't really add much to what scientists already knew, according to several experts.

Today's study focuses on the Arctic as the main culprit for the extreme winter weather. Previousresearch has suggested that the warming Arctic may disrupt the polar vortex, a ring of swirling cold air circling the North Pole. Think of the polar vortex as a river, says study co-author Judah Cohen, a climatologist and director of seasonal forecasting at Atmospheric and Environmental Research. The fast flow of this river locks up the cold air over the Arctic. But as the Arctic warms -- especially in some areas like the Barents-Kara seas north of Europe and Russia -- a boulder springs up in this river, disrupting the polar vortex and allowing the freezing Arctic air to flow south, Cohen says.

True,However there are enough people pigheaded enough to vote in people who will be willing to actively ignore the issue. vs electing ones willing to take steps to help mitigate the effects with balanced policies.

There is a difference between a politician going climate change is a Hoax. Lets go burn more fuel. vs one saying Climate change is real, however stopping from burning fuel at this point is irresponsible, but lets take steps to change this.

It is hardly some radical left wing movement when it encompasses almost all of the science community and follows practices that has shown to have worked in the past.

* Restrictions

Like the restrictions on the use of CFCs to combat the hole in the ozone layer. Despite the similar nay-sayers of the time, the restrictions didn't cause the world to end - either economically or environmentally!

* Higher Taxes

That is long-established economic principle used to control the behavior of the population. If we are told that lowering income tax on the corporations will increase investment and promote wage growth, then surely increasing taxation on certain items will result in the reduction of demand.

* More regulations

So what? This is just restating the first point, and is not intrinsically bad.

* Less choice

It seems to me that we now have more energy options than ever before, with the addition of renewable energy providers.

* Criminalization of normal activities.

Name on person who has gone to jail due to some climate change law.

While coincidences do happen, this is far too much of a coincidence, especially when you see the primary advocates of the Global Warming hypothesis making scads of money.

This is a no-win situation for the likes of Al Gore. If he didn't put his money where is mouth is he would be labeled a hypocrite who obviously didn't believe in what he was saying. And why is it that the people who find this so objectionable don't also complain about the financial conflict of interest of the big oil companies who wage anti-climate change campaigns?

Maybe you reject those regulations on drugs? Ma and Pa Kettle's Chicken Farm and Pill Mill would heartily endorse less regulations. And those nasty airline regulations? Sheesh, we could at least make sure they were cost effective. We should establish maximum number of stiffs due to crashes that a particular regulation would make harder for producing said stiffs. There's nothing a good accountant couldn't put a price on...say your grandmother. Those regulations on her retirement home are completely useless s

Are you referring to the people who simply parrot vague talking points without being able to explain themselves? Yes, I see what you mean.

"Regulations are bad, m'kay?" just sounds like Mr Mackey from Southpark rather than a valid reason to continue harming the planet. Unregulated pollution is what got us into the mess to begin with. But far be it that we confuse your little brain with an extra regulation to follow!

Like the restrictions on the use of CFCs to combat the hole in the ozone layer. Despite the similar nay-sayers of the time, the restrictions didn't cause the world to end - either economically or environmentally!

No, but there are a lot of unforseen side effects. For example, heat exchangers that use newer freon formulations are inherently larger than the ones for older formulations. A lot of homes with water source heat pumps got seriously screwed, because the new units wouldn't fit in the closets where t

The problem you have is that you think that any solution to an environmental problem must be completely free of adverse side-effects. Nobody ever said banning CFCs would be easy, just like nobody says that a wide-scale change to renewable energy would be as simple as flicking a switch (it wasn't called An Inconvenient Truth for nothing). But the mistake was not the banning of CFCs, the mistake was using them in the first place.

Also, you sound like someone who doesn't understand geography.

You are kidding right? Do you actually think that pollutants rise straight up and

The problem you have is that you think that any solution to an environmental problem must be completely free of adverse side-effects. Nobody ever said banning CFCs would be easy, just like nobody says that a wide-scale change to renewable energy would be as simple as flicking a switch (it wasn't called An Inconvenient Truth for nothing). But the mistake was not the banning of CFCs, the mistake was using them in the first place.

I said no such thing. What I said was that the benefit from eliminating the rela

And the ozone thinning that surrounds "the hole" spreads significantly north of just Antarctica. If you geography is a bit rusty, this includes continents such as Australia, Africa and South America. Also other countries like New Zealand. You may also be interested to hear that Australia has the highest per-capita rate of skin cancer in the world. The Montreal Protocol was a resounding success and as other posters have stated, sometimes the truth is inconvenient. Actions have consequences, but sometimes the

One of the problems I have with the priority that people put on Global warming is that it can be shot down. If you believe global warming is not an issue then C02 is not a pollutant, in fact a higher concentration of C02 is beneficial. Again, that is if you believe global warming is not a problem.

What is a huge problem is smog and other particulate air pollution. There are areas on the planet where the air is nearly unbreathable due to human pollution but every time I hear about environmentalists pushing

What is a huge problem is smog and other particulate air pollution. There are areas on the planet where the air is nearly unbreathable due to human pollution but every time I hear about environmentalists pushing for improvement it is to stop Global warming.

Because global warming affects everyone, while particulates affect people living nearby*. If you create too much particulate emission, those people will complain and force the government to regulate it. It's not something people living on the other side of the planet need to worry about.

* While you might be able to detect Chinese particulate emissions in California with some very sensitive instruments, but it's not going to hurt California in any meaningful way.

Former Vice President of the United States Al Gore was criticized by environmentalists when he inherited shares in the company after the death of his father in 1998; however, the shares were immediately sold.

Did you not read what I said? The OP said "less choice", I said that there was more choice. The OP said "criminalization of normal activities", I said that there was no such thing. So how is that agreeing with those points?

When Exxon funds science that supports their agenda you dismiss it. When the Government funds scientists that supports their agenda you support it. Ponder that.

When the Koch brothers funded climate research that ended up agreeing with those Government scientists, it got dismissed by the denier community who presumed that it would back their agenda. They were not happy that their tamed skeptic-scientist converted to the "other side" while doing his study. Deniers like to call themselves skeptics because it sounds more reasonable and rational, but if anyone ever has their skepticism answered and changes their mind then they are met with outrage and claims of being a

But it comes down to people arguing over the Problem vs the Solution. No the Left isn't pure, they go too far too. But when the right is actively disbelieving in the problem and promoting other to not believe in it too. Isn't conservatism, it regressionism.

1. There is no climate change.2. There is no conclusive evidence that there really is any change.3. There might be some change, but it's not man-made.4. Ok, so we're partly responsible, but we can't change that quickly now, we'd have had to start earlier.5. Ok, so we're fully responsible, but it's too late to do anything anyway, so why bother trying?

The worst problem with AGW is that it cannot be falsified. That changes it from a science to a religion. There was a similar occurrence in the USSR. It is now called Lysenkoism. A "science" in which scientific fact is determined by politics.

Too much rain -- AGWNot enough rain --AGWToo hot -- AGWToo cold --AGWEtc....Despite covering all their bases with hedges the basic "predictions" (usually after the fact) have been always wrong. Even worse, proponents are deliberately altering or destroying historic

We had a certain level of CO2 a couple of centuries ago. I'm not calling it perfect, but it was the level we built civilization around and the level the complicated ecosystems that support us evolved with. Changing it rapidly disrupts these, and at the very least that's expensive. It may be that raising it a little would have been useful, but we're well beyond that now.

You do realize that you've constructed a thought experiment and a rickety chain of reasoning to explain what you'd see, which isn't what we see when we do the experiment. As an empiricist, I googled "greenhouse gas experiment" and got plenty of references.

more energy to the atmosphere means more turbulence. On Jupiter there are huge storms and vortexes, on Neptune there are few

Neptune is not a great example. Winds on Neptune can reach 1,300 mph, the highest in the solar system, and its Great Dark Spot is, proportionally speaking, just as big as the Great Red Spot on Jupiter.

I would be curious to know how "extreme" is defined. Granted, I'm in the northeast US so my personal experiences have been limited to that area, but I don't feel like the weather has been extreme at all. Perhaps people may look at the events of the past few weeks and say "OMG, we've gotten several nor'easters in a row...the end of the world is coming." But if you look back over a couple of years, the winters haven't been particularly harsh on average.

They defined extreme weather under the Accumulated Winter Season Severity Index which looks primarily at rapid changes in temperature and unusually heavy snowfalls. The metric is a standard one you can find more about here http://mrcc.isws.illinois.edu/research/awssi/indexAwssi.jsp [illinois.edu]. Note that the AWSSI does not include wind, general precipitation, or most unusually high temperature events.

Because some bastard has move the Jetstream out of our path, we in the UK have had heavy snow (compared to our normal "virtually no snow in winter" and not to US or Canada levels) in the past few weeks and apparently due some more soon.

"Using a recently developed index of severe winter weather, we show that the occurrence of severe winter weather in the United States is significantly related to anomalies in pan-Arctic geopotential heights and temperatures" https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com]

"The study, however, only shows there might be a correlation -- not a direct causal link -- between the warming Arctic and severe winters in the U.S. And it doesn't show how exactly the two are connected."

Hard to say if this is the usual tree hugger bias here or just sloppy reporting (or likely both...it is slashdot after all).

The story itself is just one of those noncommittal fluff pieces, I'm surprised they didn't get a flat earther to chime in, since all ideas have equal weight in such fluff.

But assuming a rotating globular landmass with a tilted axis wobbling it's way around it's energy source, there will be a variance in the amount of energy received and during the the times when the polar region is most opposed to the energy source, the less energy received and the colder the region.

If anything we're getting back to the winters I remember from when I was younger, it's been unusually mild here for the past several years. I guess most of the complaining comes from the teenagers and people who moved into the area less than a decade ago, for most of us natives this weather is normal.

I can attest to that. 65 years ago I had to shovel a path through waist high snow to get a bucket of coal from the coal shed to heat the house. Blizzard of 1948. Around the last of May or the first of June of my senior year in HS the day started out in the upper 60s with a clear blue sky. By 10AM it started raining, which soon turned to hail and then sleet and snow. Six inches and an hour later the sun came out and by 3:00 pm it was all melted.

When I was much younger, the song with words "white bird in a golden cage in a winter's rain" became popular. At that time, winter rain was very rare in my area, especially if we're talking December-February. It's fairly common nowadays. I'd say that our local winters have changed significantly.

No we haven't, in south Jersey there have been at least four big snow storms here that have closed schools, work, and highways. Normally we barely have to put on a sweater in the winter and barely get an inch of snow in January and that's it. Now we have a lot of deaths on the road by people who have never had to drive in such weather before.

So what? Weather != Climate. The point is that "extreme" events become MORE COMMON, not that they didn't happen before. The point is that the the average is moving [nj.gov].

Really, this "global " scaremongering is getting tiresome.

Right because New Jersey = all of Earth. (Insert eyeroll here)

I like how you use "Weather != Climate" and then immediately state that weather is climate because "extreme" events are more common. I particularly like it because "extreme" events are not more common, the poster you're replying to pointed this out, and the story itself is a classic example of the "weather = climate (when it suits us)" argument from climatards like yourself.

Weather isn't climate. Climate is something like the integral of weather. Individual extreme events are weather. How often they happen over the years is climate. Similarly, the temperature outside the window right now is weather. What temperature range we tend to get in mid-March here is local climate.

The poster you refer to talked about what happened in his little area of the globe. By his reasoning, rains of fire and brimstone and snakes wouldn't be an extreme event, as long as it was outside New

The study, however, only shows there might be a correlation -- not a direct causal link -- between the warming Arctic and severe winters in the U.S. And it doesn't show how exactly the two are connected, so it doesn't really add much to what scientists already knew, according to several experts.

Wow, really? It's all happening on the same fucking planet. There, I explained it.

Pretty much all serious attempts at modelling global weather/climate points to one important correlation:

More heat (= more energy) in the atmosphere means that we get more extreme weather.

I think 2017 in particular but most years since 2000 have had a lot more (Carribean/US) hurricanes than what used to be normal.

Here in Norway we have had a bunch of warmer winters but also winters with far more precipitation which (when the weather is still cold enough) gives us more snow. At the main meteorological office here in Oslo the snow cover is within 2cm of the highest ever measured.

According to NOAA, the average number of Atlantic hurricanes per year in the 1968-2016 era was 6.2. with a standard deviation of 2.9In the years 2000-2016, there were only 3 years with numbers of cyclones that exceeded the average by 1 sigma.There were 2 years that had fewer numbers of cyclones (by more than 1 sigma). All the other years were average, within +/- 1 sigma.See http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/E11.html

So, our company contracts long-term weather forecasts from DTN [dtn.com], which is a company that produces weather outlook for industrial utilities and agriculture in the US and Europe. They use a variety of information to estimate future weather (monthly to decade scale), and in the process, comment on how current year weather matches historical weather. They look at multi-decade trends, and point out how this season is very similar to the 1950s, etc.

The comment in last quarter's winter forecast had to do with the "polar vortex" event that is leading to the "extreme" cold snaps across the US over the last 4 years or so. There are two factors at stake here, one being the "tightness" of the high-altitude wind currents around the arctic, and a secondary "rotation" effect. Imagine that there is an oval above the arctic that oscillates short and wide, mostly centered over the pole. The boundary is like a ripple that we see as wind currents. When it is circular, cold air is trapped up by the pole, and we have mild winters in the northern continents. However, over time, the polar winds oscillate north and south, which leads to daily oscillations in weather over the winter. What we see as large temperature swings are just the wind currents oscillating past.

If the oval becomes elongated, it allows the cold air to be pulled farther south, what we call the "polar vortex" with "abnormally" colder weather than average. Cold air is pulled down from the north, then hot air is pulled up from the south, and the intersection results in more winter storms than average, depending on humidity. But that dip pattern is also not stationary, it rotates on a multi-decade-long scale. In the 1990s, the polar vortex was over Russia / East Asia, and they observed the temperature swings. The North Americans (in our short-sightedness) think that if it didn't happen here, it didn't happen. But now two decades later, the elongation has rotated over us, and suddenly we're all freaking out about catastrophic weather changes.

The forecaster's point was all of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.

...are we going to do about it? I mean what effective thing are we going to do about it? Not a damned thing. We absolutely, positively have to burn fossil fuels or we're going to go back to living in caves... after about 95% of the population eats each other until it is small enough to be supported by farming with animals for power.

Eventually - 50, 100 years, maybe more, we'll have nuclear fusion and or sufficient wind turbines or geothermal or something AND we'll have a really effective battery or su

You left out solar. Way more powerful than wind or anything else except nuclear. Oil and coal are chemically stored solar. It is true that massive power is spread out over the whole daytime surface of earth... but space has a lot more if you can transmit it (remember intensity is higher; and duh... space.) Furthermore, we do not utilize most solar spectrum with today's PV.

Every 1 calorie of food we eat takes 10 calories of fossil fuels... and I never found a good estimate on calories of solar... but it

Yeah, I tend to leave out solar because it is inoperable or diminished so often because the sun isn't always available. I like solar, but it doesn't do a thing for you at night, and when it is available, it is too available, and produces more power than is being used, and so can't be fully exploited without batteries big enough and cheap enough for us to use. And since solar is over-available on sunny days, the power is sold for such a low price, due to supply and demand, that it's a profitability probl

This just points out that we can't really rely on our existing models of global warming and the weather changes it might bring. The entire system is so complex that our current understanding of it is woefully incomplete. We're at the stage where, while we know a lot, there's still too much of 'we don't know what we don't know' for us to make detailed predictions with any confidence.

We need to be putting A LOT more money and effort into understanding and predicting these changes and their associated timeframes. First, we'll need to plan how to protect ourselves. Second, all that data and understanding will increase our chances of finding and evaluating safe ways to slow, and perhaps reverse, AGW.

and Siberia gets a bit warmer, Russia will be able to get to all those untapped resources (way more than the US) and the US will lose pretty much its main geographical advantage, the one that is responsible for most of its wealth (a comprehensive river transport system linked to prime agricultural land).

I was reading that the hegemony of the US will probably last another 2-300 years, but climate change is probably the most likely thing to change that.

Weather isn't an indicator of global warming. When people use it it always blows up in their faces and makes people question its existance. Stop doing that! The caps could melt, we could be ten feet under water, but it may be a sunny day.

I've noticed even in my remote city that climate change is hitting us hard. In the last few years, we've seen a massive increase in sever downpours that I'm sure didn't happen in my youth. It's caused almost a million dollar deficit in the city funds because of all the upgrades they've had to make to handle these new storms so I definitely notice a change.

And to be honest it's not that hard to battle climate change, even small efforts help a lot. I've switched all my lights to high quality LEDs for example, it's lowered my power bill, bulbs never burn out. I couldn't afford a pure electric car and they don't work too well in my cold climate so I ended up getting a Volt and it works. It runs gas free through the entire summer almost. But the key is folks need to try. Too many folks seem to think they can't change and sadly many of these efforts end up saving time and money as well.

Drummed up by globalist to get to the "one world order" nonsense.
The SUN is in a QUIET period. Lack of sunspots, lack of disturbances in
the corona, lack of coronal mass ejections, lowering of the sun output, has
a DIRECT impact on our little rock. When we have little electromagnetic disruptions
to our sphere, the weather patterns change. Couple that with the movement of the
magnetic pole and you get problems of "climate change".
Well of course our climate changes...but man doesn't have the impact you t

Creating a hypothesis based on observation (explaining past events) IS science. It's part of the scientific method. A real scientist would take that hypothesis, test it (predictions and further observation), refine the hypothesis further and further. Just because something is difficult to predict doesn't mean you are not doing science.

Science: CO2 absorbs infrared
Not Science: because CO2 absorbs infrared, adding it to our atmosphere will increase the temperature of our atmosphere, which will cause more water to evaporate, which will also absorb more infrared, which will further increase the temperature of our atmosphere, creating a runaway greenhouse effect OMG we're going to destroy the planet!

Calling deniers deniers is not anti-science. Deniers calling themselves skeptics are anti-science. It's pretty easy to tell the difference: deniers will adopt any conceivable idea as an explanation as to why global warming isn't happening, because it would violate a quasi-religious belief. If someone tells you they don't think it's happening, but haven't really looked at it, that's a skeptic. If someone tells you that worldwide science is a political conspiracy related to things primarily in the US, a

No, we're scientists, thanks. We are tested by scientific principles, and we make what are in fact "predictions". The problem is that the naive do not know that a prediction is not a temporal ordering but rather the ability to generate a piece of information from within a system that has not been an input for that system. For example, the existence of the CMB is a prediction of cosmology - it's existence was calculated stated it was seen, but after it was produced. As was the relative abundance of light ele

Being something of a science buff and something of a history buff, you're wrong. That's not how history works, although scientific reasoning is useful at times. I have no idea what fields you're not ignorant in.

Although that's a legitimate point of view in the sense of being internally consistent, it excludes a large number of scientific investigations. According to your definition, neither forensic pathologists nor historians would do science or be scientists. Fair enough, so they are doing science-2 and nothing is lost, because everybody already agrees that primarily historic, explaining disciplines are different from physics and chemistry. Obviously, mathematics is also not science according to your definition.

I should have added that none of the above applies to Climate Science, since of it does make predictions, just like metereologists do for weather instead of climate. In that sense my reply was a bit pointless.

Being able to explain, what already happened does not make you a scientist.

Are you seriously claiming that paleontology [wikipedia.org] is not a science? You might want to revisit that nice little straw man definition you have there. Just because something happened in the past does not mean it cannot be studied scientifically. Remember that the past is where we get literally ALL of our data for our scientific models.

To qualify, you have to be able to reliably predict, what will happen... And there, despite several decades of trying, the Climate Scientists have been no more successful than the Economists.

You may have meant that as an insult but it isn't. Economics does make testable predictions that routinely turn out to be true. They don't award Nobel Prizes in economics for luc

Paleontology could make a statement to the effect of: "We will find a fossil with such and such features".

I think that nicely shows that you have no idea what paleontologists do or how they do it.

Your argument regarding Economists is an "Appeal to Authority" fallacy

Not at all. Go read their papers because you clearly haven't. I have a graduate degree in finance and I've worked with many of the economic models you question. The models stand on their own and make perfectly valid and provable predictions. No appeal to authority needed. If you want to disprove them go right ahead. There is a Nobel prize waiting for you if you do.

Like that distinguished bunch, Climate Scientists too can explain anything, but are able to predict nothing.

Again you make fairly sweeping claims about a field of study you pretty clearly know nothing about. The climate scientists make predictions routinely and are proven to be accurate within the limitations of the model. If you think otherwise then you haven't actually examined any papers on the subject. Sure there is a lot they still don't know but that's true of every field of science. You also have to understand that it takes years for most predictions of climate models to be proven. But the evidence is there. Your failure to examine it does not make it less valid.

We've got global warming. Looking at the entire globe, we find it's warmer on the whole. Parts of it may be colder, but on the whole it's warmer.

I have no idea how you select which claim from 2000 is "the" claim. There's been lots of them, some more accurate and some less accurate. Nor why you think a single claim that turns out not to be true should be cause for disgrace. Scientists live, study, observe, and learn.

The claims to watch are the official ones of the IPCC [www.ipcc.ch], and you can see in detail what claims they're willing to make and how confident they are in them, as well as references to how they got the claims. Your cite was of a scientist who made a claim that probably looked reasonable eighteen years ago, and which was reported on in the general press. There is no apparent way to go from that claim to the process behind it, which means that it's really scientifically useless. Very likely he spoke off-the-cuff

Actually they have jackass. When you develop a model, you need to be able to predict current and past events. Then to be useful, you need to be able to predict events that current models do not. You can fuck off and die now...

What the head-in-sand crowd doesn't realize is that all these spring snows on the east coast that have become frequent over the past ~20 years are caused by the southward loop in the jet stream shifting eastward from its traditional position, sucking down cold arctic air at the Atlantic coast. But while you're saying "What happened to global warming???", those of us out west are saying "What happened to winter???".

There is some speculation that what this article is talking about is the cause of the shift i

What the head-in-sand crowd doesn't realize is that all these spring snows on the east coast that have become frequent over the past ~20 years are caused by the southward loop in the jet stream shifting eastward from its traditional position, sucking down cold arctic air at the Atlantic coast. But while you're saying "What happened to global warming???", those of us out west are saying "What happened to winter???".

There is some speculation that what this article is talking about is the cause of the shift in the jet stream, but AFAIK it isn't certain yet.

"all these spring snows"? Please cite them.

Changes in the amount and duration of daylight received in any day (rotational period) on the Earth are due to the Earth wobbling back and forth on its axis.This is what causes seasons. In the Norther hemisphere, seasons work like this:

The ice cores don't have the resolution to show a 40-50 year lag. You have two deniertrollidiot mantras mixed up: ice core lags of 800 years and solar irradiance lags (that don't exist for half the satellite record that deniers cite to "prove" the lag exists').

"What does seem to have contributed to the abandonment of the Western Settlements, archaeologists said, is climate change. The onset of a ''little ice age'' made living halfway up Greenland's coast untenable in the mid-1300's, argues Dr. Charles Schweger, an archaeology professor at the University of Alberta, who has studied soils around the Farm Beneath the Sand.

Dr. Schweger said the Norse were no match for cooling temperatures, which caused a glacier several miles up a

This is the contorted, tortured logic by desperate believers of the Church of Global Warming to explain away record cold temperatures and winters which contradict their global warming religion. [...]

In what way are record cold temperatures in some particular spot incompatible with an increase in the planet-wide average temperature? An *average* says nothing about the highs and lows of the individual numbers!

Heck, even for a single location, you could have new records for both highs and lows and still see their yearly average go either up or down.

Your argument isn't just a logical fail, it's bad elementary school math - congratulations on making the worst argument seen in a while!